Yorick

Yorick was the deceased court jester whose skull is exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of Shakespeare's "Hamlet". The sight of Yorick's skull evokes a monologue from Prince Hamlet on the vile effects of death:

:Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? (Hamlet, V.i)

The opening words are very commonly misquoted as "Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him well."

It has often been suggested that Shakespeare intended his audience to connect Yorick with the Elizabethan comedian Richard Tarlton, a star performer of the pre-Shakespearian stage, who had been dead for around the same time as Yorick in the play. [Muriel Bradbrook, "Shakespeare the Craftsman", London, 1969, p. 135.]

Vanitas imagery

): death being unavoidable, the things of this life are inconsequential.

This theme of Memento mori ('Remember you shall die') is common in 16th and 17th century painting, appearing in art throughout Europe. Images of Mary Magdalene regularly showed her contemplating a skull. It is is also a very common motif in 15th and 16th century British portraiture. s and tombs.

Hamlet meditating upon the skull of Yorick has become the most lasting embodiment of this idea, and has been depicted by later artists as a continuation of the Vanitas tradition.

Name

The name Yorick has most often been interpreted as an attempt to render a Scandinavian forename: usually either "Erick" or "Jörg", the Danish form of the name George [ [http://www.leoyan.com/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/output4.php?file=HWORKS3300/HW-3368-69cn.xml Digest of theories of the name at Hamlet Works] ] . The name "Rorik" has also been suggested, since it appears in Saxo Grammaticus, one of Shakespeare's source texts, as the name of the queen's father. There has been no agreement about which name is most likely. [Jenkins, Harold, (ed), "Hamlet", Arden edition, Methuen, 1982, p. 386]

An alternative suggestion is that it may be derived from the Viking city of York (Jórvík), a connection that was first made in 1866. [ [http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/s3-IX/217/166-a.pdf, Notes and Queries, 1866] ] More recently Gerald Kilroy has suggested that it is an anagram of the Greek word 'Kurios', which he takes to be a reference to the Catholic martyr Edmund Campion. [Requiem for a Prince: Rites of Memory in Hamlet, in "Theatre And Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare" edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, Richard Wilson, Manchester University Press, 2004, p. 152]

The name was used by Laurence Sterne in his comic novels "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey" as the surname of the one of the characters, a parson who is a humorous portrait of the author. Parson Yorick is supposed to be descended from Shakespeare's Yorick.

Portrayals

Yorick normally only appears as a skull, but there have been scattered portrayals of him as a living man, such as Philip Hermogenes Calderon's painting "The Young Lord Hamlet" (1868), which depicts him carrying the child Hamlet on his back, as if being ridden like a horse by the prince. He was portrayed by the comedian Ken Dodd in a flashback during the gravedigging scene in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film "Hamlet".

References